I have always been hypo sensitive to pain. Then I had a bad whiplash accident and developed a debilitating pain condition, refractory occipital neuralgia. My condition has worsened for over 5 years, I have severe pain 24 hours per day. Unfortunately a team of dr's have been slow to identify the severity of the condition because the way I reported the pain was unusual due to my hypo sensitive nature. I should be fitted with a neurostimulator within the next 6 months to help me to regain function and to ease what is now completely overwhelming constant head and neck pain.

Interestingly my 2 year old son seems to also be hypo sensitive to pain. If I had a dollar for every time he took a horrendous fall and got up laughing I'd have my $15,000 neuro surgery paid for. He fell 5 feet yesterday at the playground and a young mother ran over to him expecting to find him crying or in pain, he looked up at her and simply said "bonk my head" and giggled. He then ran back up the ladder onto the play equipment he had just fell off. She said something to me about how bad his fall looked and how she was quite surprised he was unhurt. Happens all the time with that little guy.

Pain? I punch, cut and burn myself on a semi-regular basis. Physical pain is nothing compared to the emotional pain I deal with every day. A means to escape, I guess, for what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

Don't confuse me for some masochist, but I rather enjoy physical pain. Unlike the emotional kind, I feel better after I have experienced it.

is that the same sort of thing as trigeminal neuralgia?
am have had TN since teenage years,am remember what that was like when it was severe and hearing the doctor say a high dose of morphine wouldn't even work on it.

do meds not help with that type of neuralgia?

am also hyposensitive to pain-have no pain threshold on outside of body,am have bitten through tongue,stuck to turned on radiators,and controllably head banged till KOed because of it,am also have a major scar from knee to ankle on left leg from tactile/sensory seeking with a knife,had no idea was going too far,though do have inside pain like migraines,tn,stomach pain etc.

_________________>severely autistic.
>>the residential autist; http://theresidentialautist.blogspot.co.ukblogging from the view of an ex institutionalised autism/ID activist now in community care.
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kinda like Foxman. i think i feel pain at the same level as normal, just don't express it. I'd always get angry when i actually had to tell someone i was in pain as a kid, "they should be able to tell" kind of thinking. Now i know that i just don't express it unless it severe.

I broke ribs a few summers ago and no one knew until i complained i was in serious pain.

Occipital neuralgia is in the back of the head, while trigeminal neuralgia is in the face. I have, seemingly, both, although my trigeminal neuralgia is far worse. I have gotten nerve blocks for both, but the trigeminal neuralgia nerve block is wearing off at the moment.

My tolerance for pain depends on what kind of pain it is.

Some kinds of pain, I can get a serious injury and not react.

Some kinds of pain, I can feel a lot of pain but don't react to it outwardly in a typical manner, often just reacting by getting slower or quieter.

Some kinds of pain, I react strongly or even overreact to.

So it really depends on the pain.

I lived my entire life with untreated pain reminiscent of central pain, up until my early twenties, when I started getting treatment. It's either central or something else neuropathic and the tests to tell which are invasive, so right now just the fact that it responds to anticonvulsant meds is all that counts.

I have chronic migraines, as well as trigeminal neuralgia which was previously misdiagnosed as a constant migraine, and which can trigger migraines under certain circumstances.

I had early-onset gallbladder disease and showed so little reaction to the pain that doctors didn't believe I could have gallstones. Then they did a scan and found huge gallstones and when the surgeon went in after them he found that my gallbladder had completely shut down. The main sign I showed of this was a lack of responsiveness to people and a tendency to lie down a lot in public including on sidewalks.

I had an intestinal obstruction in my teens that I also did not respond typically to the pain from, and it had to be diagnosed by outward symptoms only. It was diagnosed late, and I had to have it dug out of my butt. That hurt a lot and I reacted to that.

I spent most of my childhood with intestinal pain and pain from reflux that I reported to nobody until I was 19 or 20.

I have chronic joint pain from BJHS, which I feared to report until recently. In childhood the worst of it manifested when trying to write with a pencil, and again I told nobody that it hurt, instead accepting that I must be lazy. I have now seen an occupational therapist for finger splints that will greatly improve that, and have been allowed by my doctor to use ankle braces that reduce pain when standing that used to be like knives going up my legs.

And TMJ that results from the combination of BJHS and problems with the shape of my bones.

And neck pain from spasms that mess with nerves that then seem to send pain down my spine and arms and lots of other places.

So I am very familiar with many kinds of pain. I used to not know any pain level below that of moderate-severe pain. So I attempted to function (sometimes successfully sometimes not) in a huge degree of pain, and when pain did impede my functioning I viewed it as weakness of will rather than a physical problem. Having a basis for comparison (from occasionally now experiencing mild pain), the pain is worse.

In fact, one of the worst pains I ever felt, was when I got a temporary, fully-numbing nerve block in the middle branch of my trigeminal nerve. This gave me the first sense of lack of pain in the trigeminal nerve in a long time, the pain had begun to feel like part of my face, and having the loss of pain made my face seem to "be my own" again rather than being annexed by pain. And then when it came back it was several times worse subjectively because I had a basis for comparison.

So I think a lot of my pain tolerance comes from seeing pain as just a part of the general landscape rather than recognizing it as something that ought not to be there or as a sign of something going wrong.

And I think other parts of it come from being told, of light touch, "That didn't hurt," even when it burned me (in a description of central pain, it says, "The stimulus which usually causes the most unbearable aspects of Central Pain is the evoked pain of light touch, especially light touch which is persistent and occlusive. Such patients may wear abbreviated clothing to avoid textures rubbing on the skin."). And so learning a skewed view of what "hurt" meant. My brother and others who said that didn't mean any harm by it, but they were setting me up for not understanding what pain was.

On the other hand, I certainly have been limited by pain at times, while still not knowing the source of my limitations.

And some kinds of pain I react normally or possibly even overreact to.

So it's a mixed bag for me.

But then... it took me a long time to view "pain" as a collection of all sorts of different things that all feel extremely different from each other. So of course it was a mixed bag, when I think about it without putting words to it, it all separates into different categories and putting them all into a slot called "pain" is still clumsy at best.

Also, having the central/neuropathic/whatever pain, meant that any pain I felt was highly distorted. Like if I had heartburn, I didn't feel it in one spot, I felt it over my entire abdomen, and it felt like a combination of a burning sensation, and some flat object so cold that it burned me, placed all over the entire front and back of my torso. So it was really hard for me to localize any pain in there until I got treated, and I'm still learning how to do that sort of thing.

_________________"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams

I recall as a child falling out of my upstairs bedroom window and crashing through a roof and landing on my head and shoulder. I got up and walked through the front door and told my mum, yet because I explained the situation to her with such calmness and lack of emotion she thought I was having a laugh.

I think what I have learned to do is to act as distressed as would be appropriate in such situations in order to get the help I need.

Even when I have been deeply depressed and suicidal I am able to articulate my misery so well that health care professionals think i am ok really, because i do not wear my distress on my facial expressions.